Vented to too many ppl at school already and I HAVE TO STOP IT. I have just been so sick and tired (the tired part being literal after a couple of late-nighers with bonus insomnia) of this group work.
One class I have a great group but somewhat annoying teacher (not clear on his expectations and thinks he is, thinks he is constructivist and letting us do what we want but actually wnats us to do just what he wants).
In another class my group is HORRIBLE. We originally had 5 group members, one of whom apparently has had problems with every group he has ever been in (this info has been volunteered by a number of people without my asking for it or prompting them in any way). He was very agressive with everyone and didn't respect anyone else's oppinion, in addition to a number of other odd behaviors. Luckily that problem was taken away when he and anot her student had a blow-up and included the professor in the email thread (one of his frequent tricks apparently is to attempt to make other people look bad by sneaking professors and other random people in to email discussions with the group cc-list). (Fortunately for me, the person who had a fight with him is in the same ethnic group as he is. Apparently another common tactic was to accuse anyone who he didn't like or who told on him to a professor of racism). WELL, our teacher, who seems like a decent guy and wanted to make things better, apparently had a long talk with this guy and they decided that it would be better to 'restructure' the group. The restructoring would involve one group of one person and one group of four people. He called us in and told us he hoped we could work better but was sure not everything would be resolved because working in groups is always hard, especially an "international group" (two group members are from turkey).
We were all happy at that point and hopefull that we would preform well in future and the teacher would see that we could be a good group.
HOWEVER now it seems like two group members don't do their part. Worse then people who just do NOTHING, they keep promising to do things and either not doing them at all (But sending succesive emails about being just about to do it, so you keep waiting until the last minute), or doing really, really junky jobs and insisting that they are experts in things. Since we are graded on group-work and following our revolving roles we also have to let someone be "recorder" (that person supposedly writes everything up for the reports), and otehrs do the various other roles of "coordinator" and "explorers" for each week. One of the people does a really crappy job, blames it on his Macintosh (well, I guess he is blaming it on our PCs not reading his Mac materials...then he was installing MS Office on his Mac which as far as I can tell has taken him about 1 week of continous installtion effort on his part, since I haven't seen a thing out of him since except when he showed up to group and lectured the group on Behaviorism which he is supposedly an expert on). Then, the other girl always seems to end up doing his part. (She works really really hard and does way more work then anyone, and every time I try to take more she worries about me having to much to do!)
The fourth member keeps saying that she is going to do stuff and then not doing it. Finally today she did, 1 hour before the thing is due (still waiting for the rest of her work so I can encorporate it). I can't understand where her brain is at, her stuff is totally irrelevant. so now I dont know if I should drop it and let her get mad at me or leave it in and let our group look dumb. I am not really sure if our paper is what he wants and wish we had some stronger ppl in the group to look after MY mistakes (especially since I wrote it all very, very late last night). Oh, and I asked and asked adn asked that she insert the comments in the form of MS "comments" OR she could email them to me separately but NOT insert them directly into the writing because I had already encorporated the other lady's changes and some of my own but of course she inserted her changes right into the writing so now I have to somehow find them all and merge the two versions together.
Oh, and just to make it all fun, we have a "Visiting Scholar" who barely speaks english (he apparently is a PhD student from Korea who is working on his disertation and sitting in on our beginners classes because...well, I can't figure out why he is and I'm not sure knows either. Also not sure the teacher knows). He sits in on our meetings and watches us. Usually I try to talk ot him after and help him understand anything he missed (English-wise) and see if he needs help with anything. Last night while I was frantically taking notes so I could bring htem home and write a paper I was pretty impatient. hope I didn't hurt his feelings.
anyhow sorry should probabbly just erase this letter but .... just had to vent.
back to paper now, hopefully she has sent comments because I have no time left
marisa2